Monday, August 4, 2014

Window on Eurasia: Russian Intelligentsia Again ‘Changing Its Monuments’ to Collaborate with Regime, Blogger Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, August 4 – Many members of
the Russian intelligentsia are repeating the mistake their predecessors made a
century ago, engaging in what can be called an updated version of the “change
of monuments” movement to justify collaboration with an authoritarian regime,
according to Livejournal blogger Kitty Sanders.

In a post yesterday, she noted that “the
smenovekhovtsy [‘change of monuments’] movement was an ideological trend of the
collaborationist type connected with the transition of the oppositionally
inclined Russian intelligentsia to the side of the Bolsheviks” which got its
name from a book some of its adepts published (kitty-sanders.livejournal.com/577378.html).

Among the most notable of this group
were Nikolay Ustryalov, Aleksandr Bobrishev-Pushkin, and Yury Klyuchnikov” who
declared that ‘the Bolsheviks have changed’ and have begun to act in the
interests of Russia.” Consequently, its members said, it was time to stop
opposing them and start “cooperating with Soviet power.”

Most Bolsheviks, including Lenin,
viewed these people as useful fools who could be played for propaganda purposes
and then destroyed. And that attitude has led some to think that the Smenovekhovstsy
were simply a Soviet plot. But in fact, the movement was too widespread as its
repetition shows to have been or be only that.

The Change of Monuments people
justified what they were doing by pointing to NEP as showing the Bolsheviks’
adaptation to the past, by noting its commonalities with some of the imperial
forms of governance, and especially by arguing that “Russia is in danger” and
that it “is threatened with disintegration.”

“Today,” the
Russian blogger says, “history is repeating itself with surprising precision.
The Russian intelligentsia, as in former times, is divided into socialist,
national-patriotic, and liberal branches,” each of which talks about Russian
traditions and populism and each of which has found its own reasons to engage
in its own “change of monuments” moment now.

Members of each trend, sometimes with
tears and sometimes in exaltation, are changing their attitudes toward the
regime, shifting from “anti-imperial and anti-Kremlin” positions to the exact
opposite on the basis of what they say they see as a change in the regime in
the directions that they want.

The “master” to which they are
subordinating themselves “characteristically remains the same: Putin is a
neo-Bolshevik who was sufficiently clever to begin his career not with ‘war
communism’ but with NEP,” and who then engaged in “the expropriation of the property
of disloyal oligarchs.”

Little by little he has been building a
new “iron curtain” and building alliances with “left-fascist countries and
politicians,” all of whom are united by a hatred of the United States.It is worth recalling, the Russian blogger
says, that “the Bolsheviks had exactly the same allies” at one point.

Moreover, like the Bolsheviks, Putin
has been extending his system abroad into Georgia and now Ukraine just as Lenin
tried to do in Georgia, Ukraine, Hungary and Poland, albeit with much less
success in the case of the latter two. And like the Bolsheviks, Putin uses
slogans about the need to protect an allied group abroad against European
values.

In response, “the entire political
spectrum of the Russian political intelligentsia is today going through its ‘change
of monuments’” moment, and the Russian blogger devotes her attention to the
evolution of the views of communists, nationalists, and liberals in that
direction, noting that the change has been, again like 90 years ago, hardest
for the nationalists.

“Very few people have preserved an adequate sense of
reality and an understanding that ‘against the West for autarchy’ automatically
means ‘badly’” because there is little chance that the current regime will
develop or end well.And Russian
liberals have fallen short especially often in the case of Ukraine, saying they
are all for democracy but against what Russian television has taught them to
call the Banderites.

“Unfortunately,” she continues, “history has
not taught any of these politically active people anything.” They do not see
that the authorities are not adapting to what they said they wanted; they are
adapting to the authorities “in a one-sided manner.” And “they do not
understand” that if history continues to repeat itself, “the result will be
very predictable” and bad.

What
makes the current form of collaborationism especially appalling, the blogger
suggests, is that it is being engaged in by people who still have the chance to
challenge the existing regime rather than those who won’t when the regime is
fully established. That means that the collaborators are helping the regime not
just to function but to be set up.

“If the classical collaborationist
doesn’t ask whether he would find himself under the power of the aggressor, the
change of monuments type seeks out the dictator in order to be under his power and
to cooperate with him,” she writes. “He doesn’t simply ‘snitch to the Gestapo.’
He from the beginning does everything that the Gestapo will appear and then
begins to snitch.”